3-B Gallery, CICA Museum
June 14-18, 2023
2023.06.14-18
Passive Aggression
Passive Aggression is an solo exhibition that considers and reflects on our lived experience as objects of capital. Passive Aggression explores the reverberations and merging of physical and virtual life. In particular, the way that patterns of online consumption have been combined with our physical lives, shaping our relationship to our working and living environments.
In 2017 Frost started making and uploading his Wet Unboxing video series. In these videos, products selected from an optimised and urban life were opened by hand in a water-filled tank. These videos of hands opening items underwater riffed on the online trend of YouTube unboxing videos, where products are opened and virtually consumed. Within this space of digital consumption, the Wet Unboxing videos acted-out the migration of physical desires in a life lived increasingly online.
Echoing the disembodied hands of the Wet Unboxing videos, in Passive Aggression animatronic hands respond to banal ‘data’ to act out repetitive actions and gestures. Tweets, Instagram stories or Facebook posts made by commercial corporations are converted into a digital and robotic sign language. However this is not big data – loaded with gravity and direct meaning – instead the data ‘pulling the strings’ is banal and seemingly passive, at odds with the smart objects that underpin an ‘Internet of Things’. Focusing at the point where a prosaic digital reality meets the physical, the works in Passive Aggression utilise and devise their own privatised language – and make it public.
Alex Frost is an artist based in Manchester, UK. He works between the physical and virtual to explore the inter-relational character of contemporary digital life. He seeks to identify the new concepts, places, and objects that arise as physical life merges with virtual life. His series of 100+ Wet Unboxing videos explored the fluidity of virtual consumption, as seen in the unboxing video, by unpacking a range of products in a glass tank filled with water. These Wet Unboxing videos were featured in 30+ articles across all continents, in 10 languages and were awarded a listing on knowyourmeme.com. His most recent physical solo exhibitions were at TACO! London (2021) and First Site (2020). He has a PhD in Visual Cultures from Northumbria University, UK and teaches Art and Design on the Masters at Salford University.
